On the road doing comedy

When I was ten, I rode my bike from our house in the country into downtown Minneapolis, pedaling past factories and warehouses and printing plants and through the red-light district to the great sandstone castle of the central library where I climbed the stairs past the Egyptian mummy in his glass case and a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence in another, up to the reading room on the third floor and sat devouring books and then writing bookish things on a yellow legal pad with a sharp pencil, thereby finding something that would make me happy for the rest of my life so far.